Joyful Noiseletter

Under the weather

2011-12-30T18:13:00.000-05:00

Why do we say we're "under the weather" when we're sick? I have no idea why, but it got me thinking about weather ... and googling for photographs of storms and lightning. That's when I found this absolutely awesome photo of a tornado AND a bolt of lightning. I had no idea something like this was possible. Looking at it makes me shiver! I don't want to be anywhere near this "weather," much less "under" it.

With bated breath

2010-12-14T22:33:00.009-05:00

I left a comment on my friend Beth's Blue Ridge Blue Collar Girl blog that said I was waiting with bated breath for her next post.

When I thought about it later (I really should learn to trust myself), I wondered if I had spelled the word correctly and went in search of "bated" at Dictionary.com. That's where I learned that "with bated breath" is idiomatic.

—Idiom
4. with bated breath, with breath drawn in or held because of anticipation or suspense: We watched with bated breath as the runners approached the finish line.

The Free Dictionary added:

If you wait for something with bated breath, you feel very excited or anxious while you are waiting.

I cross-posted this on my book blog, the one that's mostly about words in books.

Fulgurating

2010-10-16T11:51:00.000-04:00

"Its fulgurating pain comes out in shrieks of unlikely laughter."

I ran across this sentence (and the word "fulgurating") while reading a New York Times article. It's unusual for me to run across a word that is totally new to me, so I looked it up.

fulgurating = (of pains) sharp and piercing; lightninglike, especially of sudden shooting pain (medical dictionary)

The question now, of course, is whether I'll remember this word when I need it. Probably not, since I am not prone to sudden, sharp, piercing pain that hits me like lightning.

Exhausted

2010-10-16T10:23:00.002-04:00

Not even being tired can slow down my interest in playing with words. (I'm thinking about yesterday, when I was so exhausted I fell asleep.) I love that somebody came up with a whole sentence in the word EXHAUSTED: "Haste has exhausted us."

It's an allusion!

2010-08-22T22:23:00.000-04:00

Resolve the paradox of this poem by identifying the allusion.

IN THE GARDEN
by Anonymous

In the garden there strayed
A beautiful maid
As fair as the flowers of the morn;
The first hour of her life
She was made a man's wife,
And was buried before she was born.

Do you recognize the allusion?

Oh, you want me to define allusion? Okay, an allusion is a reference to a literary work, person, place, or event. Allusion is a means of suggesting far more than it actually says. This picture is a visual allusion to another part of the same story.

I ran across my old copy of Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, Second Edition, by Laurence Perrine, 1963. My notes in the book show that we discussed this poem in my college English class on March 28, 1966.
__________
I posted this on my Bonnie's Books blog a couple of months ago and intended to cross-post it here. I guess I forgot.

How do you pronounce "often"?

2010-07-26T22:25:00.001-04:00

This quote is from Throw Grammar from the Train:

"Sounding the t in often." I've been interested in this one since my daughter, brought up as an OFF-en speaker, went to college at the University of Michigan and came back saying OFF-ten. I don't think it's a regional thing -- I grew up two hours south of Ann Arbor, and I don't remember OFF-ten even as a variant. It must have been something she picked up from friends. ... And it's true that OFF-ten deviates from the usual pattern of soften, listen, fasten, christen, etc.

Read that last sentence again and notice that the "T" sound is silent in lots of the words we use ... (ah-hem) ... OFTEN.

Hoi polloi

2010-07-08T21:17:00.002-04:00

Hoi polloi is a Greek expression (οἱ πολλοί) meaning "the many" or "the majority." It's used in English to denote the common people, usually in a derogatory sense. As uncommon as the phrase is, it has come up twice this week: in Sunday school when the teacher read it but didn't know what it meant (I did, fortunately) and in a book I'm re-reading. This is from page xxxi of The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels (1979):

"[Gnostics] ... typically characterized themselves as 'the few' in relation to 'the many' (hoi polloi)."

I want a tee-shirt like the one pictured here!

How far is yonder?

2010-05-04T23:06:00.000-04:00

This is a photograph of Chattanooga, my hometown. That mountain over yonder is Lookout Mountain, and that's how far away yonder is. At least in this example. Yonder means "over there," so distance varies. "Way down yonder in the land of cotton" is not necessarily within sight of the singer. Flying "into the wild blue yonder" is a rather amorphous place -- how high is the sky?

Divulge

2010-02-11T15:54:00.006-05:00

"What a juicy word that is, ‘divulge.’ Truth opening its petals."

Paul Chowder, the main character in The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker, is a poet who is supposed to be writing an introduction to a volume of poetry. I haven't read this novel, but while skimming what Olduvai wrote in her review, I found that Paul Chowder considers the word "divulge" to be a "juicy word" and knew it belonged here among my other words. Olduvai says Chowder is a procrastinator, an overthinker, who says things like this:

"What is poetry? Poetry is prose in slow motion. Now, that isn’t true of rhymed poems. It’s not true of Sir Walter Scott. It’s not true of Longfellow, or Tennyson, or Swinburne, or Yeats. Rhymed poems are different. But the kind of free-verse poems that most poets write now – the kind that I write – is slow-motion prose. ... Obviously I’m up in a barn again – which sounds like a country song, except for the word ‘obviously.’ I wonder how often the word ‘obviously’ has been used in a country song. Probably not much, but I hardly listen to country, although some of the folk music I like has a strong country tincture."

Sounds to me like this Paul Chowder character divulges too much without actually getting anywhere.

It's the in thing

2009-10-30T23:35:00.007-04:00

When asked to name four places I have been, I came up with this list:

1. in hot water
2. in love
3. indisposed
4. in the know

"In" is such an interesting word. When my friend Margreet was helping me learn a bit of Dutch (she's fluent in eight languages, but Dutch is her native tongue), she made me notice just how slippery some of our little English prepositions can be. For example, the woman drawn on this ceramic bathtub is actually "IN" hot water. But what are we "IN" when we're in love? What are we "IN" when we're in the know? Here are some more "IN" phrases to ponder, not all of which are prepositions:

in debt
in power
in for it
in with
hit in the face with a pie
the in book this year
paid in cash
written in Dutch
in equal parts
a drawing in pen and ink
split in two
a life in theater
in need
in pursuit
wrote in to the editor
closed in
one in three
three in one
stepped in
took in the view
in reference to your letter
what's in this season?
in Indiana, IN means Indiana

Oh, I love playing with words! Don't you?
__________
Cross-posted on Bonnie's Books: http://bonniesbooks.blogspot.com/2009/10/its-in-thing.html

Juxtaposition

2009-10-15T10:44:00.005-04:00

Juxtaposition is such a nice word. It sprang to mind a few minutes ago when I was playing an online game and noticed the similarity of the Jewel Quest image and the tree I had used in a Blog Action Day post. The game's picture is silliness, but it still greatly resembles the tree, which has grown attached to the fence so that it looks like a face. (Click to enlarge photo.)

Justice

2009-09-30T21:48:00.007-04:00

What's the right thing to do?

I'm thinking about justice because of the class Harvard has recently offered to the public. It's an ethics class.

Is torture ever justified? Would you steal a drug that your child needs to survive? Is it sometimes wrong to tell the truth? How much is one human life worth? What do you think and why?

Justice is one of the most popular courses in Harvard’s history. Now Harvard opens its classroom to the world. Professor Michael Sandel challenges us with difficult moral dilemmas and asks our opinion about the right thing to do. He then asks us to examine our answers in the light of new scenarios. The results are often surprising, revealing that important moral questions are never black and white. This course also addresses the hot topics of our day—affirmative action, same-sex marriage, patriotism and rights. Here are some of the topics the class will cover:

The Moral Side of Murder
The Case for Cannibalism
Putting a Price Tag on Life
Consenting Adults
Motherhood: For Sale
A Lesson in Lying
Arguing Affirmative Action
The Claims of Community
Debating Same-sex Marriage
The Good Life

Purview

2008-11-30T14:27:00.005-05:00

Last chance to do a November post, so here's the last word I stopped to consider: purview. I was typing along and needed to use the word purview in my novel (draft completed yesterday). I knew the meaning of the word, but it was one that somehow didn't look quite right when I typed it out. So I stopped and looked at it, tried "per" instead of "pur" (which definitely was not it), then asked my roommate Donna. Neither of us was near a dictionary, including the online versions. So I left what I had typed: p-u-r-v-i-e-w. Later I went to my NaNoWriMo write-in (click here for my joyful report), and when I got back to our apartment, Donna had left one of our many dictionaries open to PURVIEW. Yep, I spelled it correctly! Oh, yeah, wanna talk about what it means? This is the definition of it that I intended:

purview
range of vision; scope

Interesting use of the word by the Boston Globe a few days ago:

Obama may give Clinton purview in area where they differed most

The definition as used this way is "range or scope of authority."

Mellifluous

2008-10-15T06:27:00.007-04:00

Usually when I post a word here, it's because I've run across it (again) in my reading. This morning while reading blogs by friends, "mellifluous" popped into my head for no discernible reason. It simply sounded good to me. Or maybe I was reading a mellifluous post and it was the most appropriate word.

mellifluous = pleasing to the ear;
"the dulcet tones of the cello"

Exsibilation

2008-09-01T13:32:00.004-04:00

Greg Ross found this one and posted it on his Futility Closet blog. When I looked up exsibilation, Dictionary.com had no idea. Google discovered that Wordie, a social network for people who love words, knows what it means:

exsibilation = the collective hisses of a disapproving audience

Now let's see if each of us can work this word into conversations at least three or four times today. Yeah, right!

Tough stuff

2008-08-31T03:31:00.004-04:00

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, laugh, and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps.
Beware of heard, a dreadful word,
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead — it's said like bed, not bead,
For goodness' sake, don’t call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear.
And then there's dose and rose and lose —
Just look them up — and goose and choose.
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go and thwart and cart —
Come, come, I've hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Why, man alive!
I'd mastered it when I was five!

– Anonymous

Greg Ross of Futility Closet found this, which he posted as Spelling Peril.

Dorp

2008-08-17T10:45:00.005-04:00

Dorp must be a common word in South Africa. I kept running across it in my reading of Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer and finally took the time to get online and look up the word.

A dorp [dawrp] is a village; hamlet. Wikipedia says, "Dorp is a village or small town, from the Dutch or Afrikaans word dorp; in English its use refers chiefly to South Africa." A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet, but smaller than a town or city. A hamlet is usually too small to be considered a village. Wikipedia's illustration for hamlet is this one in Switzerland.

Ghoti

2008-08-08T06:12:00.002-04:00

Playwright George Bernard Shaw was fond of pointing out that the word ghoti could just as well be pronounced "fish" if you follow common pronunciation:

"gh" as in tough
"o" as in women
"ti" as in nation

Tesseract

2008-08-02T20:56:00.006-04:00

Line = L = one dimension = length

Square = L squared = two dimensions = area

Cube = L cubed = three dimensions = volume

Tesseract = L to the fourth degree = four dimensions = hypercube (cube within a cube)

The professor calls it the "four-dimensional version of a cube."

Having fun? You should read about tesseracts in A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle.

What the dickens?

2008-07-14T10:56:00.015-04:00

This cute-as-the-dickens kitten was hiding from the rain under my roommate's car when she went out yesterday morning. Needing to get to church to teach a children's Sunday school class, she brought him to me. What could I do? I left a cellphone message that I'd miss church with family, but would meet them for lunch afterwards. In the meantime, this little dickens was exploring his new digs (interesting word) and thus totally annoying the two elderly cats who live here: Sammy, who is 13, and Kiki, who is 8 years old. You should have heard the deep-throat growling and spitting that went on! Sammy hid under Donna's bed, snarling whenever the little fuzzball appeared on her radar, but Kiki defended her turf, actively growling her "ERRRRMMM-mmmmm" whenever the hyperactive youngster cavorted too near the corner where she had retreated.

Surprisingly, this tiny fellow wasn't taking any guff from the big cats and would hiss right back at them. Once, having run from Kiki's hisey fit of snarling and spitting, he jumped into the litter box in the laundry room and said what I can only translate as "nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-NYAH-nyah ... hisssss!" Then he pooped, covered it with sandy litter, and pranced right back into the living room where Kiki sat, quivering with righteous indignation that we humans had allowed this ... this ... strutting white ball of fluff into HER living establishment.

I left the kitten closed up in the bathroom with a bowl of water and went out for lunch and an afternoon of swimming with my daughters and Cady and her mom's friend Laura. When I returned late in the day, Sammy was still under the bed and Kiki looked frazzled from listening to hours of "mew-mew-meow" emanating from the other side of that door. When I released the captive kitty, I found that everything on the counter had been knocked aside and dusty paw prints decorated the sink. (Had he first conquered any dust bunnies hiding behind the toilet bowl?)

To make a long story short(er), I must say it's been an interesting 24 hours. I was awakened at 7:30 this morning by the new cat (yes, this kitten does look like he could be related to Nucat, doesn't he?), who was ardently waging a battle against my elbow with his needle-sharp claws and teeth.

I have printed out these photos of the little dickens who has already captured our hearts and have added this caption: "Did you lose your friend? Found under car in parking lot on Sunday. To claim this cute-as-the-dickens feline, call Bonnie (phone number)." But I haven't yet taken his wanted poster to the mailboxes at the entrance to the apartment complex because I'm afraid someone will claim him.

By the way, can any of you figure out what we've named him? (Naming him means we've capitulated to the lure of his compelling cuteness and may have to keep him, right? I was afraid of that.)

Aphorism

2008-07-12T15:31:00.003-04:00

One of those emails making the rounds asks what aphorisms you grew up with.

aphorism ~ a terse saying embodying a general truth, or astute observation, as “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” (Lord Acton).

The first one to come to mind, which I therefore decided meant it was the most important in my little pea brain, was "If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing well."

It occurs to me now that having that aphorism stuck in my mind was not a good thing at all, but positively negative thinking (pun intended). Here's why ~ because my brain dotes on flipping a thing around and looking at it from all possible angles. When I do that, I get something like this: "If a thing isn't worth doing well, why bother doing it at all?" or "If I don't have time to do it well, I might as well not do it at all." See the problem? This became a problem for David when he was in kindergarten. His teacher told me he wasn't turning in any of his art assignments ... because he never completed any of them. Why not? Because he would get frustrated that a painting was not "good enough" and wad it up and throw it away. Then he'd start over ... and not have time to get finished before the class moved on to something else. So being a perfectionist meant he got absolutely zilch done. Maybe I've been like that.

Another saying seems to have been my guiding light: "Put yourself in the other person's shoes." This comes from a purported old Native American saying: "Don't judge a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins." (Or the cynical version: "Don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes; that way, you're a mile away from him, and you've got his shoes.") I think I’ve overdone this one by being overly concerned about hurting someone by what I say or do.

I have not done well with this one, either: "A penny saved is a penny earned." I have been so busy saving pennies, that I haven’t been greatly focused on earning dollars. My bad!

Click here to see some aphorism cartoons.

Dollop

2008-06-27T11:11:00.006-04:00

dol·lop (dŏl'əp)
n.

1. A large lump or portion of a solid matter: a dollop of ice cream.
2. A small quantity or splash of a liquid: a dollop of whiskey.
3. A modicum; a bit: not a dollop of truth to the story.

[1573, from E. Anglian dial. dallop "patch, tuft or clump of grass," of uncertain origin. Modern sense of "a lump or glob" is 1812. Perhaps akin to Norwegian dolp, lump.]

Though I can't remember any other times when I may have used this word, I recently used it this way in an email to a friend:

"...with a dollop of synchronicity."

__________
The image is from Dave of PsychoNotArt.com.

Brummagem

2008-06-26T11:07:00.002-04:00

brummagem \BRUHM-uh-juhm\, adjective:
Cheap and showy, tawdry; also, spurious, counterfeit.

Elderly, life-long word lovers who collect words for fun don't often run across new words. Today I did, and that word is brummagem. Jim used the word in a poem he named Brummagem Smiles (Or the Etiquette of Grins). Is this word new to you, too?

Inexplicable

2008-06-25T01:56:00.003-04:00

"Write two pages about finding
someone doing something inexplicable."
~~ Abigail Thomas,
Thinking About Memoir, page 64
Oh, what a perfectly wonderful word!

A whole bunch of excellent words

2008-04-14T18:28:00.002-04:00

ebullient
exacerbate
bourgeoisie
dismal
erroneous
eschatalogical
obfuscate
languid
gargantuan
maniacal
oxymoron
unctuous
ubiquitous
syllabic
obsequious
incessantly
conjuring
resplendent
cantankerous
diaphanous
luminescence
umbrella
nonchalant
insouciant
pusillanimous
capricious
hysterical
circuitous
nefarious
sesquipedalian
fricassee
sassafras
flibbertigibbet
queue
mellifluous
epiphnic
panancea
cantankerous

These and many more can be found here:
http://christinekane.com/blog/thirteen-cool-words

"Keeping my fingers crossed that I run into a resplendently obsequious skank today, just so I can blog about it!" said one commenter.

"My favorite invented word is gagacious. You know just what it means, and it’s so much more gracious than Ick," said another.

Spiritual formation

2008-03-04T13:59:00.003-05:00

Please bring a brief description of your spiritual background, your present spiritual self, and what you would like to get from our group talks.

Spiritual Background
Love
The Bible and the Christian tradition taught me that God is love, and my mother taught me what it meant to be loved. The basis of my early theology is embodied in the children’s song: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

The cross
I tried very hard to believe that the cross embodied love, but I don’t believe that. Jesus taught us to care for the least, the lowly, the outcasts of society. For going against the rules built up by his tradition, he became a threat and was executed. From that I learned that people who make rules to live by love those rules more than they love other people.

Methodism
Albert Outler theorized that John Wesley, founder of the Methodist church (which I grew up in), used four different sources for his theological conclusions:

Scripture - the Holy Bible (Jewish and Christian Testaments)
Tradition - the two millennia history of the Christian Church
Reason - rational thinking and sensible interpretation
Experience - a person’s personal and communal journey

I learned in seminary that scripture is the foundation for the other three, making the Bible the primary source for all of Wesley's thinking. Too much emphasis is placed on scripture and tradition, in my opinion, with too little emphasis on reason and experience. Using my god-given ability to think, I have come to see that tradition -– and that includes scripture, which is embodied tradition -- has led us astray from what Jesus said and did.

Present Spiritual Self
Jesus
Jesus embodied love (God is love, according to the Bible) in a way no one else in the Judeo-Christian tradition has ever done, but that doesn’t mean that Jesus wanted us to worship him. I personally think he would be horrified to see where the church has gone “in his name” –- by which I mean specifically two things: (1) its insistence on literalizing what Jesus is purported to have said and done during his ministry, and (2) its decision to worship Jesus instead of doing what Jesus taught.

Christ
Christians missed the mark, in my opinion -– and sin is defined as missing the mark. We missed the mark when we redefined messiah to mean something like “son of god” and began to worship the messenger. The Hebrew word messiah and the Greek word christos both mean “anointed.” King David was anointed and called messiah, but we overlook that discrepancy in our theology.

We missed the mark when we developed a religion and institutionalized it -– kneeling and bowing and kissing rings and wearing garb to set apart one group of people as though they are special and exalted, forgetting that Jesus told his followers to take on the role of servants.

We missed the mark because we turned the pre-Easter Jesus into a post-Easter Christ. We did that by insisting that people take “on faith” (in other words, accept something “fantastic”) that God performed a bunch of miraculous and magical things with a dead body because this arouses the awe of the masses who are unable or unwilling to think for themselves.

We missed the mark when we said God’s honor was so tarnished by our sins (by our missing the mark) that God required a blood sacrifice of a perfect lamb (exactly like the Jewish burnt offerings of the Old Testament that the Jews have themselves given up) before God could forgive our missing the mark. What kind of God is that? That bloody god sounds like the men in Arab lands who mis-use the Qur’an to justify killing a wife or daughter who accidentally exposes a part of her face, thus dishonoring the man. Huh?

We missed the mark when we decided the world was our oyster. Whether our world was created or evolved, the God of the Jewish testament proclaimed it good. Its goodness has become polluted and diminished during these many years of Christian reign over it. It seems to me that Christians prefer to feel entitled to do as they please rather than please God by being loving and compassionate and kind.

Not my god
During the “God is dead” hysteria of the late-1960s and early-1970s, the most rational response I heard was “which god?” Do you mean the God on high sitting on a cloud and zapping us for making mistakes? I’m glad to hear he’s dead and gone, though I haven’t seen any sign of that yet. Do you mean the God who supposedly wrote the “Word of God”? Great! Now we can forget about stoning those who break the rules in God’s rulebook. Do you mean the God who decreed that the Israelites were to kill every person and every animal in the towns they conquered? Wonderful, if that means we can now quit killing in God’s name. None of these is my God.

Oneness
I learned many years ago that we are all one. I am including the animals and the plants and the rocks as well as the humans who inhabit this planet. Since I first heard it in a philosophy class around 1970, I have been considering the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in China affects everything on the whole earth. More recently, I have pondered the possibility that a molecule in my body may once have been part of the structure of a flower or an emperor or a mountain on the other side of the world. The air I breath may once have been sucked into the lungs of Hitler, yes, or maybe Muhammad or Cleopatra or a llama in Peru. This kind of thinking is necessary to help us feel our connectedness with all other beings, all other life, every other person alive today or in the past or in the future. The closest thing Christians do to empowering this idea is to share the “one body and blood” during communion within the community, when we share the same meal with Christians all over the world and the Christians of all times. Would that the emphasis were on the oneness ... rather than centuries of arguing over whether the bread becomes the body of God when it is blessed. Share a morsel of bread and quit bickering, for God's sake!

Punctuational literacy

2008-02-22T12:06:00.005-05:00

Once upon a time I taught classes in grammar and punctuation. No, really, I did. That's why I chuckled when I read this article in the New York Times:
__________

(Photo: Cary Conover for The New York Times) Neil Neches, on a No. 5 train, underneath the placard that has earned him plaudits for his proper use of the semicolon.

Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location

by Sam Roberts
Published: February 18, 2008
Correction Appended

It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the train.

“Please put it in a trash can,” riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good news for everyone.”

Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.

Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.

“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,” Kurt Vonnegut once said. “Old age is more like a semicolon.”

In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a “New York sentence.” In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.

Semicolons are supposed to be introduced into the curriculum of the New York City public schools in the third grade. That is where Mr. Neches, the 55-year-old New York City Transit marketing manager, learned them, before graduating from Tilden High School and Brooklyn College, where he majored in English and later received a master’s degree in creative writing.

But, whatever one’s personal feelings about semicolons, some people don’t use them because they never learned how.

In fact, when Mr. Neches was informed by a supervisor that a reporter was inquiring about who was responsible for the semicolon, he was concerned.

“I thought at first somebody was complaining,” he said.

One of the school system’s most notorious graduates, David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer who taunted police and the press with rambling handwritten notes, was, as the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, the only murderer he ever encountered who could wield a semicolon just as well as a revolver. (Mr. Berkowitz, by the way, is now serving an even longer sentence.)

But the rules of grammar are routinely violated on both sides of the law.

People have lost fortunes and even been put to death because of imprecise punctuation involving semicolons in legal papers. In 2004, a court in San Francisco rejected a conservative group’s challenge to a statute allowing gay marriage because the operative phrases were separated incorrectly by a semicolon instead of by the proper conjunction.

Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker, pronounced the subway poster’s use of the semicolon to be “impeccable.”

Lynne Truss, author of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” called it a “lovely example” of proper punctuation.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, praised the “burgeoning of punctuational literacy in unlikely places.”

Allan M. Siegal, a longtime arbiter of New York Times style before retiring, opined, “The semicolon is correct, though I’d have used a colon, which I think would be a bit more sophisticated in that sentence.”

The linguist Noam Chomsky sniffed, “I suppose Bush would claim it’s the effect of No Child Left Behind.”

New York City Transit’s unintended agenda notwithstanding, e-mail messages and text-messaging may jeopardize the last vestiges of semicolons. They still live on, though, in emoticons, those graphic emblems of our grins, grimaces and other facial expressions.

The semicolon, befittingly, symbolizes a wink.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 19, 2008
An article in some editions on Monday about a New York City Transit employee’s deft use of the semicolon in a public service placard was less deft in its punctuation of the title of a book by Lynne Truss, who called the placard a “lovely example” of proper punctuation. The title of the book is “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” — not “Eats Shoots & Leaves.” (The subtitle of Ms. Truss’s book is “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”)

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If you click on Frank McCourt's name, you'll find lots of NYT articles that mention him. You may remember that I wrote about him this week.

Do you use semicolons? Ever?

My favorite book by Robert Fulghum (I think it was Uh-Oh, but I don't have the book handy just now) ends with a semicolon. In other words, his discussion is not yet finished. Neither is mine ;

The virtue of recalcitrance

2008-02-19T22:44:00.010-05:00

This evening I went to the university to hear Frank McCourt discourse on teachers. Yes, he's the one who wrote Teacher Man after publishing a couple of other memoirs (Angela's Ashes and 'Tis) and receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. In anticipation of tonight's lecture, I re-read parts of Angela's Ashes (mostly featuring his mother) and Teacher Man (about his thirty years as a high school English teacher in the New York public schools). So, knowing his writings, part of what I was doing this evening was collecting some of the words rolling off his Irish tongue.

One especially nice word I collected was recalcitrant, as in recalcitrant and obdurate teachers. It seems that McCourt's very first principal gave him a hard time on his very first day as a teacher, which, he says, was also the first day he had ever been inside a high school classroom. He expected R-E-S-P-E-C-T, respect, like what he knew from the Irish schools he attended. What a surprise!

Imagine, he said, a surgeon whose first time inside an operating room was when he walked in to do surgery on someone. That's what it was like for him, going into a New York City classroom. Immediately, there was an argument between two students and a sandwich thrown across the classroom. What's the new teacher supposed to do? Four years of training, he told us, and not a single professor had lectured on how to control sandwich fights. What should he say? His first word as a teacher was "Hey!" You can read about the episode in Teacher Man, but I'll tell you the outcome: McCourt looked at the sandwich, picked it up ... and ate it. The principal peeked in just at that time and called him into the hallway to tell him that eating lunch in front of the students didn't look good. Already on his first day as a teacher, he was being threatened by the dreaded letter that could be put in his file.

And he told us about his students. "Hey, teach!" says The Mouth, the one found in every class, the one whose job it is to ask questions to get the teacher off the subject and/or "to promote the fight that would kill time." Yeah, I remember that kid. Had one in my classes, too. Frank McCourt's advice to aspiring teachers: "Be firm or be dead!"

My opinion of Frank McCourt as teacher, formed entirely through his own words written in books and spoken tonight, is that he was a recalcitrant teacher. Most people who use the word recalcitrant probably intend to condemn the person, but I mean it in the best possible way.

1. McCourt resisted being controlled by authority figures.
2. He was not obedient and compliant.
3. And therefore, in the opinion of principals, he was probably hard to manage.

Sometimes it's important to resist authority, to be noncompliant, to be hard to manage ... if that means NOT acting like a sheep and following lock-step whatever you are told to do. It seems to me that, by definition, a teacher of creative writing must be creative. McCourt was.

Once his principal demanded to know what was going on in Frank's classroom ... where one student was playing a bongo drum, another making music on her flute, and a third reciting a recipe to the beat. "Recipes!" McCourt answered. If asked how that would fit a lesson plan or in any way be relevant, his answer would have been "Vocabulary!" The students were learning new words from the ingredients and cooking instructions found in the recipes. And the students were paying attention because it was all done as rap.

From what he said (and failed to say) tonight about No Child Left Behind, I can only wonder how McCourt's recalcitrance might show itself now ... if he weren't already retired from teaching.

Cancel credit cards prior to death

2008-02-18T18:54:00.009-05:00

Note to self:
Be sure to cancel credit cards before I die.

Customer service being what it is today, you can probably imagine how this could happen. A lady died in January, and Lloyds-TSB bank billed her for February and March for their annual service charges on her credit card, and then added late fees and interest on the monthly charge. The balance had been $0.00, but now is somewhere around $60.00.

A family member placed a call to the Bank.

Nephew: "I am calling to tell you that she died in January."
Bank: "The account was never closed and the late fees and charges still apply."
Nephew: "Maybe, you should turn it over to collections."
Bank: "Since it is two months past due, it already has been."
Nephew: "So, what will they do when they find out she is dead?"
Bank: "Either report her account to the frauds division or report her to the credit bureau, maybe both!"
Nephew: "Do you think God will be mad at her?"
Bank: "Excuse me?"
Nephew: "Did you just get what I was telling you, the part about her being dead?"
Bank: "Sir, you'll have to speak to my supervisor."

Supervisor gets on the phone.

Nephew: "I'm calling to tell you, she died in January."
Bank: "The account was never closed, and the late fees and charges still apply."
Nephew: "You mean you want to collect from her estate?"
Bank (stammer): "Are you her lawyer?"
Nephew: "No, I'm her great-nephew." (Lawyer info given.)
Bank: "Could you fax us a certificate of death?"
Nephew: "Sure."

Fax number is given, fax is sent, conversation resumes.

Bank: "Our system just isn't set up for death. I don't know what more I can do to help."
Nephew: "Well, if you figure it out, great. If not, you could just keep billing her. I don't think she will care."
Bank: "Well, the late fees and charges do still apply."
Nephew: "Would you like her new billing address?"
Bank: "That might help."
Nephew: "Rookwood Memorial Cemetery, 1249 Centenary Rd, Sydney. Plot number 1049."
Bank: "Sir, that's a cemetery!"
Nephew: "Well, what the #*!! do you do with dead people on your planet?"

Moral of this story: It's better to laugh than to cry, so throw a little humor into the mix and share it with friends on the internet.

Exuberant

2008-02-17T22:49:00.005-05:00

Did you notice that word "exuberant" in the header? Joyful Noiseletter is intended to be "an exuberant newsletter to myself about joyful things, like words, which I enjoy."

In its definitions "exuberant" manages to include enthusiasm and joy and vitality, so it's just gotta be a good word! See?

ex·u·ber·ant /ɪgˈzubərənt/ – adjective

1. effusively and almost uninhibitedly enthusiastic; lavishly abundant: an exuberant white peacock.
2. abounding in vitality; extremely joyful and vigorous; like this exuberant fellow and his friend Darwin.
3. extremely good; overflowing; plentiful: exuberant health.
4. profuse in growth or production; luxuriant; superabundant: exuberant vegetation.
5. joyously unrestrained [syn: ebullient].
6. in high spirits: an exuberant mood.

Peas and quiet

2008-02-17T22:13:00.003-05:00

The chart on the right says the din is killing us, but it doesn't even mention the one that bothers me the most: the din of nonstop television. I share an apartment with a roommate who has the television on all the time when she's at home. The noise is unremitting, and it's driving me crazy ... especially now that she is between jobs and home most of the time.

Let me paint a picture here ... the apartments in this building are each two rooms wide, a living room beside a bedroom ... and then the next apartment with a living room beside a bedroom. That means, if I'm in our living room, I'm in the room with the television. On the other hand, if I stretch out on my bed to read, I'm between TWO televisions, hers in the next room and the one in the next-door apartment where the man's TV or entertainment center emits a deep booming beat along with muffled words which I cannot decipher.

Let me be clear about my discomfort ... it isn't the volume, but the incessant sound, especially voices that never stop. My friend watches soap operas, in which, I've discovered, conversations are usually shout fests. The characters scream at each other about everything, all the time. Do TV writers believe this is how real people live? Or do they believe it's what people want to watch? I guess so, but I crave the ah-so-wonderful silence in which to think.

To get that quiet time when the words in my head have a chance to come out of hiding, I often sleep during the day so I can be awake during the quiet of night when others sleep. It's the best time of day for me. It's peaceful, it's quiet, it's relaxing and conducive of productive thinking. I visualize peace and quiet.

Oh, yeah, I also visualize whirled peas.

. . .

Quotidian

2008-02-16T03:57:00.013-05:00

Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and Women's Work is a little book by Kathleen Norris (1998, nonfiction, 10/10). I read it shortly after it was published ten years ago. Norris looks at the mysterious way that daily or quotidian stuff can open us up spiritually.

Laundry may seem an odd element in the realm of spirituality, but Norris points out that "women's work" such as laundry, cooking, and cleaning -- done repeatedly on a daily basis and seemingly never to completion -- can be seen as endless and dreary, domestic rituals to be gotten out of the way. But consider the enormous life-giving importance of feeding and clothing your family and maintaining your household and now the quotidian can be seen as something we can undertake in a spirit of contemplation. These things then become acts of love that can transform us.

In my Love post, I mentioned the importance of accepting what I must do that I neither particularly enjoy nor am able to be especially enthusiastic about doing. Hmm, I need to expand on this. How does doing the daily stuff of life relate to spirituality? I'll be back ... gotta go think about this for a bit. Here's something for you to contemplate while I contemplate laundry and other quotidian stuff.

In his book A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, Eckhart Tolle says:

Whatever you cannot enjoy doing, you can at least accept that this is what you have to do. Acceptance means: For now, this is what this situation, this moment, requires me to do, and so I do it willingly. ... Performing an action in the state of acceptance means you are at peace while you do it. (p. 296)

Only if you resist what happens are you at the mercy of what happens, and the world will determine your happiness and unhappiness. (p. 200)

The young woman in the YouTube video is certainly not happy, is she? So I ask myself, would I rather complain about doing my laundry today? Or would I rather be at peace?

, Bonnie

P.S. Were you surprised to find "women's work" following my previous post about feminism? Ha!
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Vertiginous

2008-02-15T13:07:00.023-05:00

"We’re not just in the most vertiginous election of our lives. We’re in another national seminar on gender and race that is teaching us about who we are as we figure out what we want America to be. It’s not yet clear which prejudice will infect the presidential contest more — misogyny or racism."

That's from A Flawed Feminist Test by Maureen Dowd, an opinion piece published in the New York Times a couple of days ago. And "vertiginous" means? Ah, yes, "causing or tending to cause dizziness."

Reminds me of the song Dizzy sung by Tommy Roe (lyrics below, in case you're interested).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7naDUGne9A

Listen to "Dizzy" while thinking of misogyny and racism. You might as well enjoy the feeling of dizziness as you consider the USA's convoluted evolution, still in progress, as you can see from reader response to the article I quoted above ... the NYT published When A Woman Runs for President, seven letters to the editor in response to Maureen Dowd's op-ed piece. Misogny and racism aren't limited to the United States, but it's where I am ... and where we have a black man and a white woman running for President of the United States. What's it like where you live?

, Bonnie

Who else is blogging about Maureen Dowd's article?
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Lyrics to "Dizzy" by Tommy Roe

Dizzy, I’m so dizzy my head is spinning
Like a whirlpool it never ends
And it’s you, girl, makin’ it spin
You're making me dizzy

First time that I saw you, girl, I knew that I just had to make you mine
But it’s so hard to talk to you with fellows hangin’ round you all the time
I want you for my sweet pet, but you keep playing hard to get
I’m going round in circles all the time

Dizzy, I’m so dizzy my head is spinning
Like a whirlpool it never ends
And it’s you, girl, makin’ it spin
You're making me dizzy

I finally got to talk to you, and I told you just exactly how I felt
Then I held you close to me and kissed you, and my heart began to melt
Girl, you've got control on me, cuz I’m so dizzy I can't see
I need to call a doctor for some help

Dizzy, I’m so dizzy my head is spinning
Like a whirlpool it never ends
And it’s you girl makin’ it spin
You're making me dizzy
my head is spinning
Like a whirlpool it never ends
And it’s you girl making it spin
You're making me dizzy
you're making me dizzy
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Love on the 14th

2008-02-14T05:46:00.018-05:00

What a day to start a new blog, a loverly day full of hearts 'n flowers 'n chocolates. But what if love is deeper than that? What if true love extends beyond one other person to include trees 'n sky 'n mountains 'n animals 'n people who don't look like me? Is that possible?

Such love comes with awakening to the oneness of Being. With awakening comes awareness, and with awareness come acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm. In this new paradigm, this emerging paradigm, the awakened one acts in ways that differ from our cultural norms. She finds enjoyment in what she does; she is enthusiastic about what she does; and she accepts what she must do that she neither particularly enjoys nor is especially enthusiastic about doing. That's when she knows deep inside that she really loves.

Love is a word, and words can be depleted and devalued. In our culture we have cheapened the word love by saying, "I love dill pickles!" and "I loved that movie!" and "Love means never having to say you're sorry" (a line from the novel and 1970 film Love Story starring Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal).

Instead of using the word love, I have begun to say "compassion" to get my point across. To say I love people is limp and wimpy, as is saying I care about people. If I have compassion, however, maybe I'm actually doing something to show that I care and that the person matters to me. When I sign my posts with "love" now, I hope you know that love includes compassion, caring, acceptance, and enthusiastic joy.

, Bonnie